Quotes of the Day

Most Latin American film-makers can't stand slick Hollywood formulas. But two of the best Latin movies now playing in the U.S. and Europe benefit from at least one Tinseltown trick: good timing. Brazilian co-directors Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's City of God, the brutally realistic saga of a Rio de Janeiro favela, or slum, got a big publicity boost after it opened last summer, when real drug gangs swept out of Rio's favelas and briefly shut down posh neighborhoods like Copacabana. And Mexican director Carlos Carrera's The Crime of Father Amaro, the taboo-busting story of a Roman Catholic priest who impregnates an adoring teen-age girl, hit theaters during the throes of last year's clerical sexual abuse scandals. It is now Mexico's biggest home-grown box-office hit ever, as well as a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at this Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony. Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too) — a biting allegory of Mexico's effete ruling class, told via a sex-soaked road trip — is up for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar; and for many Mexicans, native daughter Salma Hayek's Best Actress nomination for Frida counts as another south-of-the-border coup.

These films are worth the hype, and then some. And for once, they have plenty of regional company. Years used to separate successes like Argentina's The Official Story (1985), the only Latin film to win the foreign-language Oscar, and Brazil's poignant Central Station (1998), the Oscar-nominated tale of a cynical Rio woman who helps a street urchin find his family. But starting with Central Station, Latin American directors have found what many critics are calling buena onda, a consistent "groove" of relevant, top-drawer filmmaking that uses distinctly regional stories and styles but makes a connection with worldwide audiences. "These directors have developed a hybrid of U.S. and Latin American storytelling values," says University of Miami film professor Rafael Lima. "This wave will last — in fact, I'd say it hasn't even exploded yet."

The breakthrough list of recent years also includes Mexico's Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch), whose sordid, interwoven stories of Mexico City life made it one of the smartest movies of 2000, in any country; the hauntingly beautiful Behind the Sun (Brazil, 2001) and Argentina's bittersweet, Oscar-nominated Son of the Bride (2001). The leap, however, is most evident in City of God, whose driving samba-and-funk artistry provides a rare glimpse of the Dantean squalor bearing down on Brazil's tourist beaches. Hailed as one of the best Latin American films of the past half-century, it was snubbed by Oscar, many critics complain, because of its violence. Set in Rio's notorious Cidade de Deus favela and narrated by a teen who manages to sidestep the ubiquitous criminal life there, it chronicles the slum's two-decade conquest by young narco-hoodlums. Its hopscotch storyline is as full of surprises as it is void of heroes, leading some to call it a Brazilian Goodfellas; but Meirelles and Lund have choreographed something more than a stylized gangsters' ball. "Last year 68 boys were killed in Cidade de Deus alone," says Meirelles, 47, who had to get permission from a jailed gang leader to shoot on location. "Latin American cultural attitudes changed in the '90s, so we knew we could give the film a certain urgency, make you feel that you're involved in this situation."

The pups with pistols mature like rabies infections inside the film's gradually darker and tighter photography. Yet if the violence seems relentless, it's more tragic than gratuitous. The actors, many of whom were amateurs recruited and trained on site, give remarkable performances reminiscent of Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned) — most memorably in a scene in which a hardened gangbanger forces a child protégé to choose which of two even younger gangbangers to execute. Such heartbreaking moments have helped City of God amass international awards and become one of Brazil's all-time box-office champs, with more than $15 million taken so far worldwide.

This isn't the first golden age of Latin American film. In the '40s and '50s, Mexico's cinema was so well regarded that Europeans like Buñuel learned to hone their craft there. In the '60s, Brazil's Cinema Novo rivaled the French and Italian new waves, and Chile's Raúl Ruiz (now self-exiled in Paris) has long had a substantial European following. But starting in the '70s, Latin cinema's funding, talent and audience got sucked away by telenovelas — the cheesy, prime-time TV soap operas that still overwhelm Latin entertainment. In the '70s, Brazilian films held an impressive 35% of the domestic market; by 1991, when fewer than half a dozen Brazilian features were made, the share had dropped to 0.5%.

The return to form began in the '90s. As statism gave way to capitalism, spanking new multiplexes fed demand for more homegrown films. That helped spawn innovative cinema-funding laws like Brazil's, which offers tax breaks for private investment in film production and last year raked in almost $30 million (City of God cost less than $5 million to make). Last year some 50 films were made in Brazil, raising the domestic market share to 8.3%. Now U.S. distribution giants like Miramax and Columbia have jumped in to give the films unprecedented pan-Latin American and global play.

As authoritarian regimes tumble as Mexico's has, the range of stories that can now be told on Latin American screens has increased. The region's new films "frame societies in the making ? based on our point of view," says Central Station director Walter Salles, who just finished directing Mexico's new heartthrob, Gael García Bernal, in a film version of Che Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries. That means less predictable storytelling. Even though Carrera's Crime of Father Amaro is a well-worn story of clerical lust and hypocrisy, its moral center is as inscrutable as Mexico itself. We hope the young priest Amaro (played by Bernal) will be heroically redeemed when he rejects celibacy; but that pat expectation gets turned on its ear. Devising an un-Hollywood ending, says Carrera, 40, "was for me one of the most attractive things about making the film, as Mexico's identity is still in many ways an unresolved mess."

Father Amaro, which cost $1.8 million, broke Mexico's box-office record its first weekend out and has grossed almost $25 million worldwide — aided in no small part by the Catholic Church's angry public boycott of the film. Those numbers have Hollywood recruiting Latins like Juan José Campanella, whose Son of the Bride, a touching comic drama about family and mid-life crisis, is being remade in English starring Adam Sandler. What are the U.S. studios looking for? In today's Hollywood, says Campanella, "the emotional element is missing. Once upon a time, American films could guarantee 'You'll laugh, you'll cry,' but they don't know how to do it any longer." In other words, they lost the buena onda — and the place to find it these days is south of the border.

• TIM PADGETT and Andrew Downie | Rio de Janeiro
• A new wave of films has international appeal